Oracle is offering more clouds for rent. At the opening of the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 customer conference in San Francisco on Sunday, Chief Executive Larry Ellison announced infrastructure-as-a-service, a service to build and run private cloud services inside data centers, and a multi-tenant database.

The IaaS will be added to Oracle Public Cloud, directly competing in that arena with such other giants as Google. The service will provide raw computing resources, storage and networking.

Private Cloud

The Public Cloud, which was launched last summer, provides access to such Oracle products as Fusion for sales management and the company's database products. Ellison told the conference, which ends Thursday, that the company's customers, running software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, "need to run certain kinds of custom applications and move some of their existing apps onto the cloud as well." The only way to accommodate that, he said, is by adding an infrastructure service.

Oracle Private Cloud, also introduced by Ellison on Sunday, will essentially extend the Public Cloud behind a company's firewall. Oracle will install an infrastructure that it owns, using Exalogic, Exadata and SuperCluster, and the customer then pays a monthly fee based on usage.

Ellison said that the Private Cloud is "quite literally an extension of the Oracle Cloud," and added that "you can't tell the difference." He suggested that customers could use the two in tandem, such as developing and testing applications and services on the Public Cloud before implementing them on the Private Cloud, or using the Public Cloud for backup and disaster recovery.

Oracle Database 12c

The third service is Oracle Database 12c, which the company described as the "first multi-tenant database." Its architecture, which is designed to allow companies to use Oracle's database in the cloud instead of their data centers, consolidates memory, processes and storage of various databases into one database container, running on as little as one-sixth the hardware that would otherwise be required.

As an example, 50 databases might need only 3 GB of memory as opposed to 20 GB. Ellison also said that security, which can be an issue in multi-tenant databases, is not a problem in this case, as there will be auditing, reporting and redaction in the individual, private tenant databases.

On the hardware side, Oracle announced the Exadata X3, a new server designed to store all of its resident databases in memory. Exadata X3 will have a whopping 22 TB in flash computer memory and 4 TB in DRAM in a single rack, offering increased performance for large databases stored in memory.

"If you thought the old Exadatas were fast," Ellison said, "you ain't seen nothing yet."

It would take 100 racks of disk drives to match the I/O of one Exadata X3, he said. "Disk drives are becoming passe," Ellison told the gathering, and added that "customers will save so much money on storage that it will pay for Exadata X3 over and over again."

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